


One Little Room, an Everywhere

by toujours_nigel



Category: The Charioteer - Mary Renault
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-04
Updated: 2012-06-04
Packaged: 2017-11-06 19:52:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/422595
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toujours_nigel/pseuds/toujours_nigel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There had been, in all of it, but one perfect moment.</p>
            </blockquote>





	One Little Room, an Everywhere

There had been, in all of it, but one perfect moment, and that the one where he, all unknowing, had acted with a young animal’s awakening instinct, seeking love and offering it in return, all wordless. One moment, with Lanyon’s mouth on his the only place where their bodies touched. And then he had moved away, dizzy with knowledge, and Ralph’s face had closed over some swiftly-hidden emotion.

And then they had been seven years apart, and their togethernesses haunted by other beloved names, other dreadful fates.

And even this closeness, so hard-won, had its secrets and dark spaces: Laurie’s hatred of the smell of gunpowder, Ralph’s quiet misery at the loss of the sea. It was childish to expect to be always happy, simply because they were in love, but Laurie found himself feeling terribly bereft when rid of that delusion.To come home to find Ralph poring over old charts, tracing routes his ship would never take, left him feeling weary, hollowed out with his helpless desire to be of use—it would be a coward’s trick, to hold him by appealing to his overweening sense of responsibility, and there seemed little to do, save offer his simple presence. In time Ralph would turn to him, sliding his untidy thoughts neatly behind locked doors, and pretend at a consuming joy.

And from that shared pretension, each striving to cheer the other, they found sometimes the semblance of peace—odd, that it should be so difficult, or perhaps that it could at all be attained—in Laurie’s hands tight on Ralph’s injured one, in Ralph’s quiet, indulgent laugh. It wasn’t that moment in the study, by any means; never that again. 

Something rather stronger, this happiness, battered and imperfect and still doing what they could with who they were.  



End file.
